Stop Windows Telemetry/Tracking/Upgrading to Win10

This has been going around on the ‘Net the past few days. It has been found that Windows 10 uploads data to its servers even when every “feature” and app that normally might be expected to do that is disabled/uninstalled. For example, even if you don’t use the Cortana voice-command feature or Bing search, stuff is still being uploaded to Microsoft servers related to this. And even when users choose to not participate in any sort of customer improvement options and disable any kind of tracking, it is still tracking and uploading things.

Not only is this a big privacy issue, there is also a system performance issue, as extra CPU cycles must be run and disk and network activity must occur to process these telemetry-related tasks.

And it is also the case that Windows 8.1 and 7 also are now doing this. Microsoft has been adding all these telemetry and tracking aspects to them lately through Windows Update, making them closer to Windows 10.

The advice from many experts now is to not go near Windows 10. Do not install it. Retain your privacy and control over your systems.

Below are instructions for disabling the unwanted telemetry/tracking in Windows 7 and 8.1 and removing all updates associated with upgrading to Windows 10:

Below is the list of Windows updates to remove. Before uninstalling them and rebooting make sure that you have Windows Update set to not automatically install updates:

Alternately, here is a .bat file to run the above commands. It must be run in an elevated command prompt. (Don’t forget to reboot afterwards. You can proceed to finish the next steps before rebooting.)

For the following two updates, it is recommended to install them (see one of the comments below) but to modify the registry with following procedure after installing them:

After installing either of the above updates, open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Policies -> Microsoft -> Windows. Right-click on Windows and select option to create a new key and name it “WindowsUpdate”. Now right-click on the WindowsUpdate key you just created and select option to create new 32-bit DWORD and name it “DisableOSUpgrade”. Right-click on DisableOSUpgrade and select modify option and change value from 0 to 1.

Open the Task Scheduler (Win key then type “sched”). Under Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft delete the following items:

Everything under “Application Experience”
Everything under “Autochk”
Everything under “Customer Experience Improvement Program”
Under “Disk Diagnostic” delete only the “Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticDataCollector”
Under “Maintenance” “WinSAT”
“Media Center” and click the “status” column, then select all non-disabled entries and disable them.

Now you can reboot. When you open Windows Update again it will ask to install whichever updates above were removed. Right-click on each one and select “hide”.

Finally, log in to your broadband router and look for an option like “content filtering” or “block sites”. Add the following hosts to be blocked. On my Netgear router each host is a keyword that must be added.